An Outline of the History of Christian Thought Since Kant eBook

general movement of reaction which marked the century.
This reactionary movement has indeed everywhere run
parallel to the one which we have endeavoured to record.
It has often with vigour run counter to our movement.
It has revealed the working of earnest and sometimes
anxious minds in directions opposed to those which
we have been studying. No one can fail to be
aware that there has been a great Catholic revival
in the nineteenth century. That revival has had
place in the Roman Catholic countries of the Continent
as well. It was in order to include the privilege
of reference to these aspects of our subject that this
chapter was given a double title. Yet in no country
has the nineteenth century so favourably altered the
position of the Roman Catholic Church as in England.
In no country has a Church which has been esteemed
to be Protestant been so much influenced by Catholic
ideas. This again is a reason for including our
reference to the reaction here.

According to Pfleiderer, a new movement in philosophy
may be said to have begun in Great Britain in the
year 1825, with the publication of Coleridge’s
Aids to Reflection. In Coleridge’s
Confessions of an Enquiring Spirit, published
six years after his death in 1834, we have a suggestion
of the biblical-critical movement which was beginning
to shape itself in Germany. In the same years
we have evidence in the works of Erskine and the early
writings of Campbell, that in Scotland theologians
were thinking on Schleiermacher’s lines.
In those same years books of more or less marked rationalistic
tendency were put forth by the Oriel School.
Finally, with Pusey’s Assize Sermon, in
1833, Newman felt that the movement later to be called
Tractarian had begun. We shall not be wrong,
therefore, in saying that the decade following 1825
saw the beginnings in Britain of more formal reflexion
upon all the aspects of the theme with which we are
concerned.

What went before that, however, in the way of liberal
religious thinking, though informal in its nature,
should not be ignored. It was the work of the
poets of the end of the eighteenth and of the beginning
of the nineteenth centuries. The culmination of
the great revolt against the traditional in state
and society and against the conventional in religion,
had been voiced in Britain largely by the poets.
So vigorous was this utterance and so effective, that
some have spoken of the contribution of the English
poets to the theological reconstruction. It is
certain that the utterances of the poets tended greatly
to the dissemination of the new ideas. There
was in Great Britain no such unity as we have observed
among the Germans, either of the movement as a whole
or in its various parts. There was a consecution
nothing less than marvellous in the work of the philosophers
from Kant to Hegel. There was a theological sequence
from Schleiermacher to Ritschl. There was an
unceasing critical advance from the days of Strauss.